Advances University of Arkansas - Fort Smith Foundation, Inc.
The Newsletter of the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith Foundation | November 2013 | Vol. 5 - No. 1
$56,895,040 Giving Opportunity campaign meets, then surpasses, ambitious goal
The problem with numbers like $56,895,040 is that they’re tough for most of us to really conceive of; past a certain point, they become little more than abstractions—impressive-sounding abstractions, of course, but still abstractions. So try thinking of it this way: if all of that money had been given for endowed scholarships, it would generate something on the order of $2,850,000 each year in money to be awarded to scholarship students. That’s still an awfully big number, but now divide it by $5,500 (UAFS in-state tuition and fees for a year) to get an answer of 518. That’s the approximate number of students per year for whom $57 million could provide full scholarships. Now, not all of the money given during the Giving Opportunity campaign was intended by the donors for student scholarships, and not every Foundation scholarship is a full scholarship, but the point is that even such a dizzying figure is easily reducible to real human terms.
As it should be, since it started that way too, the product of many individual, deliberate, human decisions to help others by making a gift—12,240 of those decisions, to be precise, the total number of separate gifts made to the campaign. The very first of those decisions was made by Mrs. Donnie Pendergraft in 2004, when she gave the incredible $5 million gift that would inspire and provide impetus for the remainder of the campaign. For the next five years, campaign co-chairs Neal Pendergraft, Robert Young III, Bill Hanna, Bob Miller, and the late Sam M. Sicard worked tirelessly alongside the Foundation staff and Chancellor Paul Beran, raising $31 million by the time the “silent phase”—during which leaders work quietly to get what amounts to a good head start on the campaign—ended in 2009 and the campaign was publicly announced. Along the way, the campaign weathered the death of Chancellor Stubblefield in 2005 and then the economic downturn that began in 2008 and dealt a heavy blow to
charitable giving across the country. Yet the Foundation’s board and staff persevered and on December 31, 2012, announced that campaign had not only reached its goal, but actually exceeding it by 14 percent. On its surface, the impact of the Giving Opportunity campaign isn’t hard to quantify. For starters, private scholarship dollars awarded per year are up 168 percent since 2004, endowed professorships and chairs have tripled, from two to six, and the new Learning and Research Center at Boreham Library is open for students with the help of more than $1 million in private support to date. But perhaps the most telling number is one that’s a bit more obscure. Of the 2,889 separate donors who made gifts to the campaign, 2,261 had never before made a gift to UAFS. And that—clear evidence that the word is getting out about UAFS’s transformation into a premier regional university and a cornerstone upon which the future of our community is being built—may mean more in the long run than anything else.
U AFS G E T S HIGH M AR KS F OR ENDOW ME NT DOL L AR S PER ST U D EN T The success of the Giving Opportunity campaign endowment of any two-year college in the nation brought the UAFS Foundation’s total assets to roughly that participated in that year’s Voluntary Support of $70 million, with an endowment total of around Education survey. $53.6 million, making it one of the largest nonprofits That support, though, is without question more in Arkansas and putting UAFS remarkably high on the important now than ever. For the 2012 academic scale of endowment dollars per full-time-equivalent year, UAFS received about $3,711 per annualized student (FTE). full-time-equivalent student in With around $8,500 in state funding. This is a decline endowment per annualized in state funding of around 18 FTE, the UAFS Foundation percent from 2002. Adjusted ranks well above foundations for inflation, the decline in state ENDOWMENT PER FTE of peer institutions. funding is even sharper. $5,666 Indeed, UAFS and its Thanks in large part predecessors have always to private gifts, UAFS is $8,539 benefitted from a very thriving—offering more supportive community. programs, recruiting stronger STATE FUNDING PER FTE The year before joining faculty, building better $4,553 the University of Arkansas facilities, and enjoying a 2002 System, UAFS reported growing academic reputation. $3,711 2012 the highest per-student
ENDOWMENT VS. STATE FUNDING
CULTURE OF GENEROSITY — “Our campaign to raise money for scholarships, among other things, has resulted in wonderful letters from students who have received those scholarships, most of whom say they are the first people in their families to have the privilege of going to college,” says Bob Miller, chair of the UAFS Foundation’s Board of Directors and one of the original five co-chairs of the Giving Opportunity campaign. That’s not a surprise; in fact, more than 55 percent of students at UAFS are the first in their immediate families to ever attend college. It perhaps goes without saying that helping send these first-generation students to college has a major and far-reaching impact on the prospects of a community, but it may also create a new generation of donors. “They are so impressed with their opportunity,” says Miller, “that many of them tell us they hope to be able themselves to provide for scholarships to other people in the future.” And that will make them fit right in as members of the Greater Fort Smith community, which, according to a 2012 survey published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, donates a greater percentage of its income than about 80 percent of other metro areas in the country. “The generosity of the people of this community,” says Miller, “made the success of our campaign possible.”
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